63Poetry and Poetic Composition in the Progymnasmata

Progymnasmata are treatises that provide rhetors with exercises for their students. Their aim is essentially to train young people in rhetoric, and the question of poetry’s place in this context may seem strange. Yet the boundary between poetry and rhetoric is not as unbridgeable as it may seem. Not only do progymnasmata make innumerable references to poets and their works, but also rhetors and students of rhetoric do not turn away from poetic composition either (cf. Trapp’s and Nesselrath’s papers in this volume). Papyrological evidence, although sometimes difficult to interpret, seems to indicate that students were keen to write encomia in verses. Ethopoeia also seems to have been one of the preferred exercises for the learning of poetry, as theorists indicate, in particular Aelius Theon, and as numerous papyri testify. Despite the supremacy of rhetoric in the first centuries of our era, the links between poetry and rhetoric remained close, and both served each other well.